Tuesday, 13 March 2018

"Mary Magdalene" (IndieWire 27/02/18)

For fourteen years, the heathens of Hollywood have struggled
to build on the lightning-strike success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with its bizarre combo of torturous
piety and throat-grabbing showmanship. Gibson infamously became persona non grata shortly after
submitting his softer 2005 recut; the studios’ initial response – 2006’s The Nativity Story, overseen by a pre-Twilight Catherine Hardwicke – sunk
without much trace; and the gap in the market came to be flooded, and
eventually saturated, by those evangelically funded and minded indies (of which
2014’s God’s Not Dead remains the
most prominent) preaching wholeheartedly, if not always so elegantly or
competently, to the converted.

Universal’s Mary
Magdalene might, then, be counted as the first serious mainstream reckoning
with faith for almost a generation. Toplined by the ever-committed, never-smiling
pair of Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix, helmed by Lion’s emergent Garth Davis and produced by the team behind the
laurelled The King’s Speech, it would
presumably have been pitched into the 2018 awards mix itself had key distribution
partner Harvey Weinstein not been kicked out of the temple at a critical moment
in its genesis. Rescheduled for a not inapt Easter release, what emerges is the
definition of a mixed blessing: a film of (often literal) peaks and troughs, scattering
occasional moments of grace.

Davis approaches his task with the same unimpeachable
sincerity he brought to Lion, aiming
for a very specific patch of centreground: to draw out those elements of this
story that might be considered human and enduringly relevant, and to do so
without incurring the wrath some brought down on Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. His film,
accordingly, is Sunday-school tasteful, deeply politically correct, and
informed by an evident level of scholarship – much ritual, sporadic speaking in
tongue – even if it doesn’t always easily translate into compelling action or
credible behaviour. These characters move in mysterious, even mystifying ways;
as with a lot of faith-based dramas, you may feel as if you need to have The
Book to hand.

The script, by the British pair of Helen Edmundson and
Philippa Goslett, strives to reposition Mary Magdalene – slandered in early
Church texts as a prostitute, a slur that stuck for centuries – as something
akin to a radical free spirit. First seen engaging in impromptu yet improbably successful
midwifery, she rejects the love match made for her by an overbearing father
(Denis Menochet), and flees home altogether after pa attempts to flush out the
demon he perceives to have got into her. Here, Edmundson and Goslett suggest,
are the roots of that slander: that Mary was a young woman who resisted
patriarchal control to travel her own path, and came to be roundly denounced by
her elders for doing so.

A question mark lingers, however, over the extent to which
this early A.D. creation can convincingly be converted into a feminist icon. Her
limpid eyes front and centre, Mara plays the part as a quivering reservoir of
empathy waiting to be channelled in the right directions; after some shaky
introductory scenes, it’s a performance that grows on you, yielding a more
thoughtful and touchingly relatable Mary than, for one, Gibson’s altogether
idealised, two-dimensional, none-more-Catholic Madonna (Monica Bellucci). Yet in this incarnation, Mary remains a
gal longing for a saviour – it’s just he happens to be the Saviour, that’s all.

A further problem: we start to doubt whether he’s all that. The
unpredictable JP as JC sounds promising, and the actor undeniably looks
shroud-ready, Biblical mane, prophetic mien and mystic gaze all very much in
place. (In a film of prodigious facefuzz, his beard would give Homeland’s Saul a run for his shekels.) Phoenix
scarcely radiates warmth, however, and his big oratorical moments are
undermined by some affected speech patterns a more experienced director might
have stepped in and shut down. Instead, he appears smug and superior, a
holier-than-thou hippy tutting through a first-wave toga party – the first
Jesus outside the blasphemies of Family
Guy to seem a little bit of a dick.

Granted, Davis is going for youthful idealism – floating the
notion that these kids were revolutionaries seeking to topple an oppressive
regime – with Mary consolidating the disciples’ impeccable intersectionality. Chiwetel
Ejiofor brings his usual gravity to bear as an identifiably African Peter, a choice that might seem risky were we in less sensitive hands, while
Tahar Rahim, as Judas, seizes upon the closest thing here to a character arc,
boyish enthusiasm shading into sad-eyed betrayal. For much of the film, though,
they’re left looking like backpacking students, set to endless trudging up
hillsides where someone or other starts proclaiming dialogue apparently sourced
directly from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

As Godly spectacle, the film is too introverted to be
overwhelming: in place of miracles and wonders, we get pauses and shuffles. Everything
Lion made transporting and otherwise
moving – the sense of youth finding its chosen place in the world – turns
repetitious and uninvolving in the draggy second act. Only when we get to Jerusalem
does Mary Magdalene snap into focus
as narrative, chiefly because it gives these kids something to physically rail
against – moneylenders, Judas kisses, Romans and all. It’s a little on the late
side, though: where Gibson made you feel the agonies of his Christ for what
seemed like weeks, we’re whizzed through this Calvary in less than five
minutes.

Along the route, Davis arguably reclaims this story from the
religious right, rerouting it away from lacerated, victimised flesh and back
towards tolerant souls: he’s aided by the late JóhannJóhannsson’s typically searching final
score, and cinematographer Greig Fraser, who – while not on Bright Star form – stages the odd fresco
of bodies at prayer that might have made even a syphilitic Old Master offer thanks
to the heavens. What’s missing is anything much of Gibson’s passion, which –
however wayward or inflammatory – might just have pepped up those stretches of Mary Magdalene that become
indistinguishable from sermons or unleavened bread: manna for believers,
perilously dry for everyone else.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).